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Consumers' local search behaviour - infographic

28/11/2014 | SEO & SEM | 5 minutes

Understanding how your consumers behave towards locality is a fundamental step in creating a strategy to cater for that behaviour.

It goes beyond just having a Google Local presence, although that's one of the steps we'd recommend you have covered. It's also understanding how and when
consumers search for and use local search information. I've taken a look at recent trends on Google and put together the following infographic.

Google Pigeon

So from this data, we can gather that local search will be affecting
the way that your customers are looking for your business and services.

In July 2014, Google made some further significant updates to its local search algorithm. Codenamed Pigeon, Google’s new algorithm is meant to provide
a more useful, relevant and accurate experience to users seeking local results. It all points to locality being increasingly high on Google's priority
list.

To find out more about Google's history of algorithm updates and how your business can adapt to them, read our blog post.

So what can you do do help take advantage of the move to locality?

If locality is important to your business, local Search Engine Optimisation, and to a degree local search ads, should be high on your priorities. Local
SEO takes traditional SEO optimisation techniques and focuses more on geographic and vicinity terms. When applied to your website and online marketing,
this enables your customers to see your website listed in Search Engine Results when they’re searching for a product or service you provide near to
their location.

Analysing your own audience, your competitor terms, and most importantly conducting your own thorough keyword research is vital to identifying the right
local search terms. Once you have the right data behind you, you can roll this out through your SEO plan; to your SEO sitemap, to your existing content,
and to your content plan.

Of course, optimising your site to attract more, relevant, local traffic is just the start, you'll still need to consider how your local searcher will
interact with your site and the type of information they want. Check out our local SEO checklist to make
sure you're covering all the bases.